By Gail Binkly

"Whatever happens to Escalante will happen to you next," a longtime resident of that town in Garfield County, Utah, warned an audience of about 30 Montezuma County landowners Thursday night.

Steve Gessig, one of three anti-wilderness activists invited by the Southwestern Colorado Landowners Association to speak in Cortez, advised area residents to fight any move to give national-monument status to approximately 165,000 acres of BLM land on the McElmo Dome west of Cortez.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has visited Montezuma County twice in recent months and advocated giving a special designation to the area, either as a national monument or a national conservation area, in order to protect the Anasazi ruins and relics scattered throughout the vast, arid region.

Gessig and his companions, Myron Carter and Curtis Coyle, all reside near the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which was created in 1996 by President Clinton under the 1906 Antiquities Act. Locals had essentially no input into the decision, and many are still angry about the designation.

"It was an abuse of the Antiquities Act," Gessig charged. A U.S. district judge in Utah recently lent some support to that point of view, denying a motion to dismiss a case challenging the designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The case is being brought by the Utah Association of Counties and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

Although administrators promised that the new monument status would not harm the ranchers and permit-holders who depend on the land, Coyle said, that hasn’t turned out to be true.

"They’re proposing to close many of the roads down," he said, and many others will be designated "administrative," which might or might not mean that permittees could use them.

In addition, the newly released management plan/final Environmental Impact Statement for the Grand Staircase monument does not show roads going to many existing water developments, Coyle said. Any time access to water is restricted, it affects a rancher economically, he said.

Although no existing grazing permits within the monument have been taken away, Coyle said, there is mention of diverting some water from livestock to wildlife if it becomes feasible, "and there’s only one way that will ever happen because we don’t have enough water as is. The cows have got to go," he said.

Gessig said environmental groups have been trying to drive ranchers out of business for years.

In the mid-’80s, he charged, groups such as Earth First! and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance began "monkey-wrenching" in southern Utah, shooting cattle, leaving gates open, destroying water troughs and scattering salt licks Ñ "all for the sake of running us out of the area and implementing their own environmental agenda."

Don’t believe it when Babbitt says that grazing can continue unchanged on the McElmo Dome if it becomes a monument, Gessig advised.

"Remember: All national monuments eventually become national parks," he said. "When the government says nothing will be different, don’t believe them. They’re lying."

For instance, at Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments, area ranchers were told they could continue grazing their cattle there and mineral rights would be unaffected, "but then they became national parks and they stopped all that," Gessig said.

Carter likewise said not to listen to promises of pumped-up revenues from tourism. "You can’t base your whole economic structure on tourism and that’s what they’re trying to do to us," he said.

Many in the audience asked what measures they could take to fight a national-monument designation.

Carter advised working within the law, holding rallies, contacting senators and congressmen, and working with groups such as People for the USA. Legal challenges may help as well, he said.

But local resident Roger Hazlewood called for more dramatic measures, such as a confrontation between federal employees and county officials similar to the one that occurred in Nye County, Nev., half a decade ago, when a commissioner bulldozed a road that federal officials were trying to close.

"The problem with going through the courts is, sooner or later, you have to go through a Clinton employee who’ll rule against you," Hazlewood said. "Just get our commissioners and sheriff to run them off and that’s the end of it. If I was a commissioner and wanted to get re-elected, I’d sure jump on that bandwagon."